Claude Lévi-Strauss: ‘Neolithic’ & A Man of Science

Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died on October 30th (aged 100), made the study of anthropology as fashionable as philosophy and poetry. The Economist pays a tribute: “Before Claude Lévi-Strauss revolutionised the discipline, anthropology in France, and generally elsewhere, was a matter of ill-attended lectures in small, cold halls, and the collection of feathers and fish-hooks as evidence of the quaint divergences of the ‘primitive’ tribes of mankind…

“As he faded, he mourned the vanishing of the tribes. ‘Primitive’ man was not nobler or purer than he was, but they were, in the deepest sense, connected: for universal laws linked his thinking, in all its book-lined complexity, to that of the Indian clad only in tree-bark, trailing a deer along a forest path…

“Mr Lévi-Strauss, throwing down the gauntlet in ‘La Pensée Sauvage’ in 1962, saw nothing primitive about the tribes he studied. Totemism, for example, was a system as complex as the Linnaean classification…”

More here…

Levi-Strauss drew comparisons between American Indian myths and the story of Cinderella; demonstrated how some Amazonian tribes divided their villages into rival halves that synthesize through marriage; and tracked diverse folk tales through Latin America to show how they were related in form, says Bloomberg.

“Intellectuals such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida cited Levi-Strauss’s methods in their social analyses. Seminal French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre engaged him in debate over the issue of personal freedom, while feminist Simone de Beauvoir agreed with his human-kinship theories, which focused on the social exchange of females in non-Western societies.” More here…

Levi-Strauss left France as a result of the anti-Jewish laws of the collaborationist Vichy regime and during World War II joined the Free French Forces, reports Associated Press.

“Levi-Strauss also won worldwide acclaim and was awarded honorary doctorates at universities, including Harvard, Yale and Oxford, as well as universities in Sweden, Mexico and Canada.

“A skilled handyman who believed in the virtues of manual labor and outdoor life, Levi-Strauss was also an ardent music-lover who once said he would have liked to have been a composer had he not become an ethnologist.

“He was married three times and had two sons, Matthieu and Laurent.” More here…

While in New York, Lévi-Strauss immersed himself in the great body of anthropological accounts of North and South Amerindians that early US anthropologists and linguists had been accumulating for more than a century, says The Guardian obituary. “The data collected from the Amerindians and its complexity delighted him, and made him react permanently against reductionist explanations of culture, which implicitly denied the intellectual achievement that indigenous mythology and social thought represented.

“The basis of the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss is the idea that the human brain systematically processes organised, that is to say structured, units of information that combine and recombine to create models that sometimes explain the world we live in, sometimes suggest imaginary alternatives, and sometimes give tools with which to operate in it.

“The task of the anthropologist, for Lévi-Strauss, is not to account for why a culture takes a particular form, but to understand and illustrate the principles of organisation that underlie the onward process of transformation that occurs as carriers of the culture solve problems that are either practical or purely intellectual.

“For him anthropology was scientific and naturalistic, that is scientific in the way that structural linguistics had become scientific. By looking at the transformations of language that occur as new utterances are generated, by using the tools that a particular language makes available, structural linguistics was able, so Lévi-Strauss believed, to understand not only the irreducible specificities of a particular language, but also the principles that made their production possible.

“In this way, linguistics, as he understood it, was a branch of the humanities and a natural science that is able to connect directly with psychology and neurology.” More here…